Children from low-income households are at risk for entering school behind their more economically advantaged peers across major domains of school readiness. The Head Start program represents the federal government's response to these achievement gaps by mandating the use of scientifically based assessments and curricula to provide children with…

Engineering play is a new perspective on preschool education that views constructive play as an engineering design process that parallels the way engineers think and work when they develop engineered solutions to human problems (Bairaktarova, Evangelou, Bagiati, & Brophy, 2011). Early research from this perspective supports its use in framing…

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate an assessment tool entitled the Algebra Curriculum Based Measure (ACBM) with the intent of measuring preschool children's sorting and classifying skills based on one attribute (color, shape, and size) and two attributes (color and shape) simultaneously; and their ability to explain their…

Preschool social education has become an increasingly important area of research and practice in mainland China with the social domain being recognized as an independent preschool curricular domain since 2001. Little is known, however, about the specific teaching practices that Chinese preschool teachers are using to promote children's…

The notably low level of reading proficiency across the United States, combined with the known importance of teachers for student success, necessitates improved understanding of teachers' knowledge, how it is acquired, and its role in instruction. This study had four goals: (1) identify whether domains of content knowledge and pedagogical content…

Assessment of social and emotional learning (SEL) in young children is critical to understanding developmental progress and informing care and instruction. The current study investigated the development of a behavior rating scale designed to measure SEL skills in preschool-age children. The primary objective of this study was to investigate the…

The number of young children with autism is ever-increasing, and school psychologists are more frequently required to identify these students. Valid screening tools are needed in order to focus school psychologists' time on those students in need of intensive evaluations in Early Intervention programs. The purpose of this study was to examine the…

As English becomes an international language in the world, there is a growing interest in developing English skills from early childhood. In Korea, the demand for English as a foreign language education for young children has increased considerably in the past decade. However, little is still known about the professional knowledge of an early…

A changing classroom population and lack of English as a Second Language or bilingual instruction at the preschool level has required Head Start teachers to teach English language and literacy skills to English Language Learners (ELLs). The purpose of this dissertation was to develop and validate a new scale to measure preschool teachers'…

The three-fold purpose of this mixed methods study was to (a) analyze how preservice teachers' perceptions of teacher preparation program variables affect preservice teachers self-efficacy for literacy instruction, (b) determine how preservice teachers describe their teacher preparation program with regard to self-efficacy beliefs for…

Research indicates that many factors may impede teachers' ability to develop caring relationships with students such as the school environment (Schaps, 2009), lack of cultural understanding (Thompson, 1998), the teacher's beliefs and attitudes about care (Goldstein, 2002), and personal experience of being cared for (Noddings, 1984). Yet, little…

This paper describes the confirmatory factor analysis, validity, and reliability data collection stage of the development of a scale to measure mainstream teachers' self-efficacy beliefs for teaching ELL (English Language Learner) students. Data were collected from 708 K through 12 teachers and pre-service teachers with varying degrees of…